Very interesting article. However, after he explained the dogma of otherness and got other people to agree that it is what they believe, it would have been a l

Very interesting article. However, after he explained the dogma of otherness and got other people to agree that it is what they believe, it would have been a lot more direct to ask them if there is any way to determine if this belief is correct or not. He could also asked them why it is bad for people to believe in absolute truths. They likely would have answered that it leads to the West oppressing other nations, and then he could have pointed out that that the belief oppression is bad is a Western one, and not even all Westerners believe it, and many non-Western cultures believe quite differently. I have thought a lot about the D of O, and have come to the conclusion that the people who advocate it don't actually believe it. You can see this because they have absolute moral responses when another culture does something that clearly violates liberal norms, like female genital mutilation. And ditto when it comes to their evaluation of the views of other people in our own culture, like conservatives. The D of O advocates clearly believe that there are absolute factual and moral truths, and that they have them. So why do they pretend to believe the D of O? That is a long, complicated story, but a large part of what happened was back in the 1950's Marxism ran into a dead end where it couldn't win people over through normal direct political argument. And then many French radical intellectuals responded to this problem by coming up with a new two-part persuasion strategy. The first part is to try to get people who believe in capitalism to give up their views by persuading them there is no absolute truth so they would abandon their beliefs as to why the free market is the best economic philosophy. And then once the leftist had accomplished that they would change positions and persuade the now-former capitalism supporter that Marxism is the absolute best. Needless to say, this strategy has failed, but it has unfortunately left us in the position where a great many Americans say things that are nonsense and that they don't actually believe.